Intentionality

My friend and colleague Richard Beck has written up a wonderful series of eight posts on the discourse and phenomenon of “intentionality” in Christian settings. The whole thing is worth reading. Richard is in part responding to me, both things I’ve written and conversations he and I have had offline. The topic came up again in a recent interview he did with another friend and colleague, Greg McKinzie, on his podcast Theology on the Way. They start talking about intentionality at about the 1:48:00 mark, discussing the matter for the final fifteen minutes of the video episode.

Before I add my own two cents, let me set the table. Two years ago, at the conclusion of a review of John Mark Comer’s latest book, I wrote the following:

[I have a question concerning] the idea of “intentionality.” Comer makes much of this, as do many Christian writers and pastors. I’m less convinced. If, for example, the forces that shape our daily habits are so hard to resist that they require a Rule of Life to counteract them—and I agree with this judgment—isn’t calling on individual believers to form a personal plan of spiritual action just moving the problem one step back? If most Christians are not moral heroes, if they are just trying to get by without losing their faith, is it reasonable to expect them to possess the resolve to audit their spiritual habits, fashion a personalized plan of attack, and execute it?

Like Comer, I believe the church has much to learn from Stanley Hauerwas, James K. A. Smith, and Tish Harrison Warren on the role of habits and “liturgies” in forming our hearts. The fly in the ointment, however, is that the kind of liturgical formation presupposed in Christian history was neither self-starting nor optional nor individually directed. It was a matter of communal obligation imposed by ecclesial authority. It was nonnegotiable, on pain of mortal sin.

You didn’t discern meatless Fridays. If you were Christian, if you were obedient, you did the fast like everyone else. You didn’t decide when to feast. The calendar told you when to do so. Fasting and feasting, sacrament and confession—these were just obligatory. For many they still are. As it happens, this is far more faithful to Aristotle and his insights on the formation of virtue through habit than our present attempts to personalize daily liturgies. We run the risk of DIY spirituality, which is the very thing we want to avoid.

Two quotes from the book illustrate this challenge. One has Comer citing “our vision for a new kind of church,” which he implemented while still a pastor. The other records Comer’s experience of finishing Kallistos Ware’s book on Eastern Orthodoxy: “It felt like coming home.”

These two impulses are at odds with each other. One rethinks church from the ground up; the other receives the church as it is from an authoritative past. The tension between them makes Practicing the Way an unusually resonant and useful resource, even as they quietly pull in different directions.

Consider them as ecclesial types. Is the church the corporate sacrament of salvation, whose liturgy is a foretaste of heaven and whose voice speaks with divine authority? Or is the church the company of disciples, a vanguard of urban contemplatives whose daily life together attests the kingdom of God? To my ears, the second sounds like a kind of spiritual Navy SEALs—elite, ultra, for the special few—whereas the first seems tailormade for normies, deplorables, mediocres, and failures. For the Simon Peters and Sauls, the rich young rulers and Kichijiros.

I’m sure Comer would say this is a false dichotomy: We don’t have to choose between them; that’s just the problem that got us into this mess. He may well be right. But I wonder.

That’s more or less still where I find myself. Note that the tone is diffident. That’s not coyness on my part, or mere kindness toward Comer. I think this is a very difficult question. I’ve benefited enormously from writing on the spiritual disciplines, and fashioning my own Rule of Life on an annual basis throughout my twenties was a crucial spiritual lifeline. I’m an insider to this discussion, not an outsider. (Hence the otherwise glowing review!)

The danger, as I see it, runs in one of two directions. Either we respond to individualistic, self-improvement DIY spirituality with only more of the same; or we so ramp up the criteria and expectations for the Christian life that the only folks remaining in the pews are the virtuous and the heroic—or even a certain personality type: the zealot, the passionate, the neurotic. But notice who’s not there: the loser, the mediocre, the motions-going-through-er, the wheels-spinner, the perpetual relapser, the self-loathing, the nominal, the failure.

In other words, my fears is that Intentionality Discourse is a religion for the thoughtful, the educated, the self-reflective; for readers, thinkers, and doubters; for people who listen to Christian podcasts and who grew up going to church camp (or who converted as adults and are all in). It’s the Pareto Principle, or 80/20 Rule, applied to the church. But instead of admitting that twenty percent of a local congregation does eighty percent of the work, we rhetorically kick the eighty percent out so that the church becomes nothing but the twenty percent. Now we can get down to business with all the slackers out of the way! After all, if you’re not going to do your part, if you’re not all in all the time, then you must not be a real Christian!

The truth, though, is that most people, most of the time, just aren’t like this. Most people, including Christians, are worried about bills to pay and kids to raise and doctors appointments and that weird sound the truck keeps making. They’re not “on fire.” They’re not constantly self-conscious in their faith. They’re just there. They’re just people who believe in Jesus, trying to make ends meet and, in my view heroically, still finding time to give their worries to God in prayer and to make it to church on time.

I’m not suggesting that this, whatever this is, is “enough.” I’m not saying Jesus isn’t calling them, too, to follow him, to take up their cross like all disciples. I’m saying that there is a particular kind of discourse, a way of talking about the gospel and the Christian life, that both reflects and reinforces a specific, local, non-universal sub-group or class of people’s way of being in the world. And it’s not obvious why we should generalize this group’s mode of inhabiting faith to everyone else.

By analogy, consider marriage. For most of history, including church history, people were “just married.” Marriage was not a means to happiness or self-fulfillment. Marriage was successful if you formed a household, weathered the storms of life, raised children, and brought honor to your clan or community. The measure of success wasn’t how you felt about it—which doesn’t mean love or emotions weren’t a part of it, just that they weren’t the social index of the institution’s well-being.

Marriage is different today, at least in our time and place. In some ways that’s simply something we have to accept and work with. But there are ways of indulging the pathologies of this cultural shift, precisely within the church, that exacerbate the problem. When Christians talk about marriage in ways that only ramp up, rather than tamp down, the emotional expectations of young people that this is where personal fulfillment happens (and maybe only here), then we have set up a whole generation of believers for massive disappointment. Yes, we have to talk about “intentionality” in marriage today. But that’s not because “intentionality” is some cross-cultural, much less universal, virtue of “good” Christian marriage. Rather, it’s because the kinds of things many people in our culture expect from marriage call for response and engagement, not withdrawal and silence. Marital duties and obligations today really are different, in some respects, than past Christian marriages. That’s fine. But in responding to these changes we can make the problem worse as much as we might make it better.

So with faith and discipleship. What people need, in my view, are grooves to slide into that are not daily-curated individual choices demanding constant self-conscious reflection. That’s just the problem we’re dealing with. Heavier doses of it are little more than gasoline on the fire.

So the question is: If human psychology and habituated unconscious behavior remain facts about us—if that hasn’t changed since premodern times—how can Christians be “background believing” people in a pluralistic age? I’m riffing here on Richard’s helpful distinction between “background” and “foreground.” I think he’s right about the relevant shifts from Christendom to a secular era. But if it remains true, in spite of all that, that by nature we literally cannot function as always-on “intentional” people, what are we supposed to do? Ever more talk about intentionality isn’t going to get the job done. We need some spiritual automaticities humming away beneath the hood when we aren’t thinking—which is most of the time.

Even here and now in the twenty-first century West, this is actually how many people still operate, including religious people. Many people, maybe most, cannot not live this way. Most of your daily rhythms must be unchosen, unconscious, unintentional—in the strict sense. I don’t know if I could live for five minutes fully and utterly “on” about “everything.” And I’m a neurotic egghead stuck, all too often, inside his own psychodramas! I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy. It can’t be the solution.

And to be clear, this has very little to do with high versus low church or Protestant versus Catholic. Contra Richard, this isn’t an oedipal reflex—i.e., if we only had the divine liturgy forming us, then we’d be fine. Richard’s, Greg’s, and my shared ecclesial upbringing (Churches of Christ) was the cream of the crop at training believers, old and young, in a broad set of “givens” that functioned as theological nonnegotiables for everyone in the community. Talk about an Aristotelian tradition. The CoC habituates you all right. No need for pope, creed, or mass. The local congregation’s got it covered.

So that’s not quite what I’m getting at. Nor is the issue the language of volition or intention. I don’t think popular talk about “intentionality” shares much substantive content with technical theological definitions of the will and intention. “Intentionality,” as actually used in sermons and lessons and popular Christian writing, has much more to do with stepping back from one’s life, assessing it, making plans and goals, and being self-consciously purposeful rather than “mindless” or “automatic” in one’s daily spiritual walk with Christ. In practice, hence, it has much less to do with the kinds of things Richard rightly commends: obeying the teachings of Christ, setting one’s heart on the Lord, directing one’s attention to the Spirit. These are biblical commands and activities that pertain to all believers but remain distinct in important ways from what pastors and writers mean by “intentionality.”

Here are some ways of putting the difference. I can kiss my wife on the way out the door or I can do so as part of a written plan. I can hug my kids before they leave for school or I can think about it as I do so. I can tell my brother I love him or I can stand outside myself, noting clinically whether I feel anything as I say it. I can pray with my student or I can mean to pray with him (whether or not I ever get around to it). Perhaps I only move to pray with him if I muster sufficient sincerity within myself beforehand.

In short, am I commanded to follow Christ? Or am I commanded to maintain a continuous stream of conscious thoughts about following Christ as I follow him? In his book Decreation Paul Griffiths imagines heaven as a perpetual liturgy in which we are freed to worship God without subjective self-awareness. That is, we remain the agents and selves we are, but we are liberated from the prison of the inner theater and its endless dramas of the self on the stage, and in this freedom we are able fully, finally, and utterly to give our selves, to give our hearts and minds, our ears and eyes, to the Lord in his glory as the satisfaction of our souls’ desire. And we do so exactly because we aren’t thinking about ourselves; because we aren’t self-conscious. Self-consciousness, for Griffiths, is an artifact of the Fall. Our healing entails remaining conscious without self-consciousness.

Yet we are not less free in heaven. We are more free. So here on earth, granting our pilgrim state. Even if intentionality, for some of us, is a necessary tool, it is a limited tool meant to get us somewhere else. Saints are not intentional, whether or not they ever were. They climbed the ladder and kicked it over once they got to the top. Intentionality may—again, for some of us—be a means to maturity in a secular age, but it isn’t maturity as such. Maturity is where we’re going, not where we start or where we’re headed. And as both Peter Maurin and Jean Daniélou emphasized in their writing, we want our communities to be places where being good—praying, worshiping, following Christ—is easier, not harder. Why take secularism for granted? Why let it set the terms of what we’re working for in our churches? Perhaps what Stanley Hauerwas once called “peasant Christianity” is actually far more possible, far closer to realization, than we’ve assumed. I don’t like the language of turning back the clock or putting the genie back in the bottle. It’s true that we have to work with what we have, when and where we have it. But all too often we take for granted contingent conditions subject to change. They aren’t immovable. The Overton Window is not set in stone. Let’s name the desired destination, irrespective of our context, and then see what it might take, within our context, to get there.

That might take some intentionality(!) on the part of some of us: leaders, writers, thinkers. But as a general formula for normies, I’m not so sure.